Currently, when a customer orders a product, goods are made to order or sold from the stock of the seller's company. Make-to-Order goods are when goods are produced for a customer after the customer has ordered them. In contrast, to when goods are Sell from Stock in which production is decoupled from sales via the stock. In the make-to-order scenario, material procurement covers material requirements originating from a single dedicated sales order. If the make-to-order process is used on a finished item level, then the procurement quantity is equal to the sales order quantity. The make-to-order scenario is frequently used if the product can be produced in different variants or configurations. In this case, the product may typically be procured or produced in exactly the configuration requested by the customer.
However, when goods are made to order, the customer will often have to wait for the components to be ordered and for the good to be made. The make-to-order process objective is to cover individual customer demands in time. However, the total lead time of a sales order across all production levels is often longer than acceptable for customers. When goods are sold from the stock of a seller's company, the customer may be limited (e.g., by the stock on hand) to which goods and/or which variants of the goods the customer may order.